An Army at Dawn (54 page)

“You’ll run out of ammunition before we’ve finished,” the prime minister warned. He had objected to a noon photo session on grounds that it was far too early for him to appear at his best, but had agreed to “put on a very warlike look” for the occasion. Now he scowled at the sun and tugged the brim of his homburg. One reporter thought he resembled “Peter Pan with a cigar stuck in his mouth” to another, he seemed “a rather malicious Buddha.” Roosevelt asked if he would care to remove his hat for the cameras.

“I wear a hat to keep the sun from my eyes,” Churchill replied. “
You
should wear one.”

“I was born without a hat,” the president said with a chuckle. “I don’t see any reason for wearing one now.”

As the generals took their chairs—Giraud stiff as a tin soldier, De Gaulle slouching, cigarette between his thumb and forefinger—Roosevelt offered a few sketchy words about the conference just ended. Details must remain secret, he said, but the meeting had been “unprecedented in history. The chiefs of staff have been in intimate touch. They have lived in the same hotel. Each man has become a definite personal friend of his opposite number on the other side.”

The chiefs stared impassively from their foliage redoubts.

So, too, had Generals Giraud and De Gaulle been in intimate touch, the president added. (In truth their brief dialogue had been limited, as one diplomat noted, to each offering “the other the privilege of serving under him.”) Asking in fractured French for the two generals to demonstrate their commitment to the liberation of France, Roosevelt grasped each by the elbow and almost physically lifted them from their seats. They stood, they shook, they sat—so quickly that the photographers howled and they had to repeat the pose with grim, waxwork smiles. “This is an historic moment,” the president declared. The generals then stalked off through the banana trees, leaving their minions to release a joint statement of haikulike concision: “We have seen each other. We have discussed.” Roosevelt waved and called after them, “Bon voyage!”

“It was all rather embarrassing,” reporter Alan Moorehead later recalled, “like the first rehearsal of an amateur play.”

Now the president had another issue he wanted to raise.

“I think we have all had it in our hearts and heads before, but I don’t think that it has ever been put down on paper by the prime minister and myself, and that is the determination that peace can come to the world only by the total elimination of German and Japanese war power,” he said. Perhaps even the British journalists knew the story of U. S. Grant, who at Appomattox in April 1865 had demanded unconditional surrender from Robert E. Lee?

Similar terms seemed fitting in this war, Roosevelt said. “The elimination of German, Japanese, and Italian war power means the unconditional surrender of Germany, Italy, and Japan.” He glanced at a sheaf of notes. “It does
not
mean the destruction of the population of Germany, Italy, or Japan, but it does mean the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and subjugation of other people.”

The reporters might even consider calling this conference the “unconditional surrender meeting,” he added. Churchill nodded. “I agree with everything that the president has said.” The Allies must insist upon “the unconditional surrender of the criminal forces who plunged the world into storm and ruin.”

No one scrutinizing that Buddha-like countenance guessed that Roosevelt’s proclamation had caught the prime minister short. After the war, Churchill suggested that the unconditional surrender demand had taken him completely by surprise, but that was disingenuous; the issue had been raised by Roosevelt on the evening of January 18, when Churchill even proposed a joint statement “to the effect that the united nations are resolved to pursue the war to the bitter end.” He had then cabled London for advice from his war cabinet, which on January 21 unanimously endorsed the concept and, unlike the prime minister, also favored extending the surrender demand to cover Italy. What Churchill had not expected was that Roosevelt would make such a blunt declaration here and now.

For his part, the president later said the notion “just popped into my mind”—a ludicrous claim: in the notes he referred to at the press conference, the term “unconditional surrender” appeared three times. After contemplating the concept for over six months, Roosevelt had broached it with his military chiefs at the White House on January 7; none of them objected and, what is more remarkable, neither Marshall nor any other chief thought to initiate staff studies of what the demand might mean for the conduct of the war. At Anfa, the American chiefs had briefly discussed the issue among themselves, listening without comment to General Wedemeyer’s impassioned warning that “unconditional surrender would unquestionably compel the Germans to fight to the very last” and would “weld all of the Germans together.”

What was done was done, and much debate would be devoted in the coming months and years to the consequences of such a grand action taken with so little forethought. Clearly, Roosevelt was eager to avoid the mistakes of 1918; the ambiguous armistice signed then had later allowed the Nazis to claim that political betrayal rather than battlefield reverses caused Germany’s defeat in World War I. But the president’s Civil War analogy was flawed: Grant had issued his famous terms in 1862 during the siege of Fort Donelson in Tennessee, not three years later in Virginia. Nor was unconditional surrender a feature of Britain’s wars: none of the fifteen since the end of the sixteenth century had ended thus. Perhaps a closer parallel lay in the Third Punic War, when Rome demanded that Carthage unconditionally surrender all her “territory, cities, and citizens,” as scholar Anne Armstrong has observed; the Carthaginians refused, and the war ultimately ended with their city’s obliteration in 146
B.C.

What was done was done indeed. The reporters had their story. Soon they would repair to the same airy room where the chiefs had met, collectively churning out 100,000 words on their typewriters, while censors scrutinized each new page before passing it to Signal Corps radiomen for transmission. But first the two leaders invited the correspondents to come forward and shake hands. Squinting from under his hat brim, Churchill extended a hand to each in turn, asking, “What’s your paper, eh? What’s your paper?” Next to him Roosevelt canted his head and beamed like a ward heeler cadging votes. “Pleased to meet you,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

As a Scottish reporter strolled toward the hotel with an American colleague, he cocked a thumb toward the president. “Ah,” said the Scot, “he has the touch, the touch of the world, has he not?”

The Sinners’ Concourse

E
ARLY
that afternoon, while the hacks pounded their keyboards, Roosevelt and Churchill slipped out of Anfa in the olive-drab Daimler. For four hours they drove due south on Highway 9, stopping only for a roadside picnic of boiled eggs, mincemeat tarts, and Scotch packed in a wicker hamper. American fighter planes patrolled overhead and Patton’s sentries stood guard every hundred yards for 150 miles. Late-afternoon shadows stretched toward the Atlas Mountains as the motorcade pulled into Marrakesh in a moil of dust, luggage, and swaggering Secret Service agents.

Churchill had beguiled the president with tales of the thousand-year-old “Paris of the Sahara,” a red adobe caravanserai of desert nomads and snake charmers and “the largest and most elaborately organized brothels in the African continent.” General Marshall’s stern demand that Roosevelt “refuse any invitation of the prime minister” to visit this suspected nest of Axis agents had been ignored. For a few sweet hours president and prime minister, respectively code-named A-1 and B-1, would retreat as far from the war as possible.

Their refuge was the estate of La Saadia, loaned for the occasion by the rich American widow who owned it. The russet stucco villa (fifteen bedrooms) was embellished with intricate Moorish carvings, sunken baths, and ceiling frescoes in gold and royal blue. Five gardeners tended the lush grounds and the immense emerald-green swimming pool. As at Anfa, Army engineers had feverishly installed wheelchair ramps, secure scrambler phones, and extra electrical transformers. The villa’s French butlers were supplanted by American soldiers who received a quick course in dining room etiquette and practice in serving food from huge platters to other GIs pretending to be the president, the prime minister, and their courtiers. It was all too much for the supervising American lieutenant, who suffered a nervous breakdown and was locked in a bedroom after heavy sedation with a bottle of bourbon.

Looming above La Saadia was a six-story observation tower with a winding staircase. At Churchill’s insistence, two aides fashioned a chair with their clasped hands and carried Roosevelt up sixty steps to a wicker chair on the open terrace; Lord Moran, the prime minister’s physician, later recalled the president’s “paralyzed legs dangling like the limbs of a ventriloquist dummy.” The Atlas soared ten miles distant, a mesmerizing spectacle of pinks and violets that deepened as the sun sank. “It’s the most lovely spot in the whole world,” Churchill murmured. He sent down for the president’s coat and draped it across Roosevelt’s shoulders tenderly.

They sat in reverent silence. Arabs rode their swaying camels through the city gate called Bab Khemis. The red walls of Marrakesh dissolved to an oxblood hue. Electric lights twinkled around the great souk and the square known as the Sinners’ Concourse, where shackled slaves from central Africa once stood at auction and where sultans had staged mass executions to discourage revolt. From every minaret in Marrakesh the muezzins’ cry called believers to evening prayer as the Atlas darkened and the mingled scents of honeysuckle and orange rose on the evening airs, wafting across the little terrace like the precise odor of piety.

Darkness and hunger finally drove them down. The president took a last wistful look at the indigo mountains before hooking his arms around the necks of his porters. Churchill followed, softly singing a tuneless ditty of his own composition: “Oh, there ain’t no war, there ain’t no war.”

In the world where there
was
a war, the transactions at Casablanca would help chart its course until, thirty-two months later, Berlin and Tokyo lay in ruins. The main strategic consequence of the eighteen meetings held by the combined chiefs at Anfa was a year’s postponement of a cross-Channel invasion, a delay that probably saved the Allies from catastrophe. The weight of numbers accumulating in North Africa, and the decisions taken in the
TORCH
debates the previous summer, gave the Mediterranean strategy a certain inevitability, which Casablanca simply confirmed.

But what should happen after Sicily remained unclear; the British no less than the Americans lacked a comprehensive vision for winning the war. American chiefs so frequently asked, “Where do we go from here?” that the British grew huffy. The danger inherent in a Mediterranean strategy was that war against the European Axis would veer into a protracted fight against Germany’s junior partner, Italy; the soft underbelly might also have “chrome steel baseboards,” in Marshall’s ominous phrase. And as Admiral King had observed at Anfa, for at least another year “our main reliance in Europe is on Russia.” That would hardly please the Russians, who were still locked in titanic struggle at Stalingrad. “Nothing in the world will be accepted by Stalin as an alternative to our placing fifty or sixty divisions in France by the spring of this year,” Churchill acknowledged.

The compromises at Anfa had been greased with ambiguity, and the coming months would show that some of the chiefs’ plans were either unsound, unfeasible, or simply undone by events. Schemes to invade Burma and attack the Japanese naval base at Rabaul died a-borning. Shipping shortages—an arcane subject understood by almost no one outside a small, briny priesthood—put “a stranglehold on all offensive operations,” in Brooke’s words. To refit eleven French divisions, as Roosevelt had blithely promised Giraud, would require 325 cargo vessels the Americans simply could not spare.

Hopes for an Anglo-American bomber offensive to pummel German targets had also faltered. “I note that the Americans have not yet succeeded in dropping a single bomb on Germany,” Churchill observed in early January. That was unfair: not only had more than 600 planes been diverted from the U.S. Eighth Air Force in Britain for use in Africa, but nearly all aircrews and support units had been stripped bare; the paltry force of American bombers and fighters remaining in the United Kingdom pounded German submarine pens in France, as the British wanted. Many months would pass before air commanders could fulfill the chiefs’ January 21 order to wreak “the progressive destruction of the German military, industrial, and economic systems, and [undermine] the morale of the German people to a point where their armed resistance is fatally weakened.”

Many months would also pass before the demand for unconditional surrender seemed germane. Some strategists agreed with J.F.C. Fuller that the term would “hang like a putrefying albatross around the necks of America and Britain,” needlessly prolonging the war and turning its end into an Armageddon. Yet certain clear advantages accrued, as Roosevelt knew. The unambiguous demand reflected Allied public opinion, provided a moral lode star, and seemed a natural corollary of total war. Britain now was committed to smashing Japan even after Germany collapsed. Most important, the Russians would worry less that their Western allies might sign a separate peace of the sort made with Admiral Darlan. Little evidence ever emerged that the declaration fundamentally altered the military course of the war; perhaps it discouraged membership in German resistance cabals, which remained pitifully weak. If uttered without sober reflection, the demand could also be considered “a word of encouragement and exhortation addressed by companions to each other at a turning point on a journey which promised still to be long and arduous,” as the British historian Michael Howard has concluded.